Thoughts?
Holy monkey! The 3ds max vs. Maya argument now has a new fork (merge?) in the way! They’re owned by the same company! 
I’ll be interested to see how this plays out, much like the merger of Macromedia and Adobe.
What I’d like to see happen for FIRST teams is for them to get both 3DS Max and Maya, or at least a choice between the two.
I hope its Maya. I just downloaded the free PLE and I am having a way easier time learning Maya than I ever did with Autodesk, considering that nearly my entire sophomore year was spent working with the 3D animation team and that I’ve only toyed with Maya for about one hour.
Makes you wonder how long each product line will last.
Imagine a world where Alias|Wavefront and 3ds Max both run cross platform, render together, . . .
>>Nirvanic Bliss<<
personally, as much as i want to blow up 3dsmax6 sometimes, i love it to death. ive toyed with maya and yes it’s easier to use and learn, but if you’re going to do a totally awesome animation, i’d go with 3dsmax6. its more popular (which means more public support and addons), its more flexible, and its totally compatible with inventor and cad, as long as you know what you’re doing. i think its going to extremely interesting to see what happens with the merge. i wouldnt be surprised if autodesk collected all the copies of maya and burned them at nationals, just to purge the world. but whatever…i guess we’ll see what they do
If you know what you are doing, you can crank out amazinly cool and realistic animations and models in either program. I have seen crazy cool pictures from both, but I might have to say that I have seen cooler pictures from Maya than 3DSM. How will Autodesk resolve the issue of conflicting product lines? I don’t know, but I would imagine that both will still be sold for a while, in the mean time Autodesk will probably work on a way to merge the two.